I get asked a lot of questions about how to pair wines with different types of food, what goes with what and so on. How about pairing a single wine to work with seven different food items? Sounds challenging huh? Well let me tell you first hand it certainly can be. It started when our Chef Bryan Moscatello and I were looking back at our trip to Italy before we opened Potenza. We loved sitting outside these small restaurants whether it was in a city like Rome, Siena or Orvieto …

Recently I’ve been able to get out to many of our wonderful local eateries.  In doing this I have come across one small obstacle.  That obstacle is the fact that even my stomach is not large enough to hold everything I want to try.  See, for me the whole point of dining out is to sample a chefs creativity and as much of it as you can.  So dinner after dinner I order everything I would like to try and either leave unbelievably full or leave a ton of food …

I was sharing some fun wine stories with our restaurant staff during a wine training class this past week. Since I had spent a tremendous amount of time in Napa Valley, I was asked about some of my favorite places, where did I used to hang out, visit and was my favorite restaurant my namesake Bistro in Healdsburg and so forth. One story I mentioned was the first time I drove to the top of Spring Mountain in Napa in a very beat up CJ7 and saw firsthand a winery …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my desire to see a larger variety of seafood on local menus. Later that week is was fortunate enough to come across a restaurant serving cuttlefish which happened to be delicious. Since then I have began my menu development for the fast approaching autumnal season. For this I have started playing with a variety of products, the aforementioned cuttlefish, sablefish, turbot, langoustines, live scallops, rouget, and suzuki to name a few.
I must admit it has been a long time …

To close out, what has become a series of posts about dessert wines, I feel it is fitting to share how I was turned on to my other favorite Icewine.  Going back about 20 years ago, I was working in Boston running a snazzy restaurant in the South End where I was introduced to a totally crazy Canadian who owned a winery in Ontario on the Niagara Peninsula of Canada. I had always felt that Canada had great beer and mediocre wines at best. But when I met Donald Ziraldo …